Jeremy Wagstaff: Reuters/BBC/WSJ etc

Menu

Archive of posts tagged Electronic commerce

Some folk have asked me for more details about the DigiNotar breach after my brief appearance on Al Jazeera this morning. So here are the notes I prepared for the segment. Links at the bottom. Background web security certificates are digital IDs issued by companies entrusted with making sure they are given to the right …

By Jeremy Wagstaff (This is a copy of my weekly syndicated column) You really don’t need to thank me, but I think you should know that for the past 10 years I’ve been fighting a lonely battle on your behalf. I’ve been taking on mighty corporations to rid the world of spam. Not the spam …

This podcast is from my weekly slot on Radio Australia Today with Phil Kafcaloudes and Adelaine Ng, wherein we discuss HP buying Palm, students going cold turkey on social media, and China no longer being the spam capital of the world? To listen to the podcast, click on the button below. To subscribe, click here. Loose Wireless 100430 …

An Indian phone company is warning users against a variation on the premium rate phone scam, whereby users are contacted by email or mail and asked to call a number to confirm winning a prize. The number is a premium number—either local or international—and the user has to sit through several expensive minutes of canned …

(Update: corrected a few things. You can’t see the person’s bank account number. But you can see anyone’s phone bill, whether or not they’re a customer of that bank.) — Here’s a hole in Internet banking that allows anyone with an account at a bank to look up other customers’ people’s bills–tax, water bill, Internet …

I remember an instructive conversation with a guy who developed services for the mobile phone. I was suggesting some fancy service or other that involved a small app sitting on the phone. He said it wouldn’t fly with users. “No downloads, no registration, keep it simple,” he said. “Or it won’t stick.” Maybe that’s why …

Phone spam feels like it’s getting worse. I and my wife have been receiving numerous calls from the local arm of ANZ Bank — a bank I am happy to identify by name because I’ve sought comment from them without reply for nearly a week now. Our mobile phone numbers were probably sold by another …

I really hate being asked for lots of private details just to download a product. In short: People shouldn’t have to register to try something out. An email address, yes, if absolutely necessary. But better not: just let the person decide whether they like it. It’s the online equivalent of a salesperson shadowing you around the shop …

Are companies like eBay knowingly peddling stolen goods? Surely not, but I wonder about their advertising strategy. I get confused about how sponsored results work. You know, those textual ads that appear alongside search results or on a webpage. I mean, I thought I knew how they worked: someone buys a word and when that …

(A podcast of this can be downloaded here.) The walls of elite reviewers come tumbling down, and it’s not pretty. But is it what we want? I belatedly stumbled upon this piece in The Observer by Rachel Cooke on a new spat between editors, reviewers and blogger reviewers, and not much of it is new. …